85 Seconds To Midnight Mohamed Monaiseer Solo : Tabari, DIFC
In 85 Seconds To Midnight, Mohamed Monaiseer examines history through cycles, repetition and flows, while probing the unstable boundary between imagination and reality. Notions of war, occupation and imperial power have long animated his practice; here he considers how they recur across contexts and generations, altering borders, enemies and technologies while preserving familiar structures of domination. The body of work was developed during the war on Gaza, which began while Monaiseer was undertaking a residency at Can Serrat in Spain. The exhibition brings together a web of references to explore how violence repeats across time and how the stories through which we encounter it are subjective and constructed.
The title, 85 Seconds To Midnight, invokes the current status of the Doomsday Clock and its measurement of humanity’s proximity to catastrophe. Time is mobilised in various ways in this series, as a countdown to judgement day and through the idea of cycles. Monaiseer sees colonial power resurface in patterns of contemporary occupation, dispossession, territorial control and the unequal valuation of human life, and during the residency he came to connect these ideas to our contemporary state of emergency and its mediation. He is equally interested in the forms through which these realities reach us. News reports, digital images, literature, oral histories, conspiracy theories, folklore and myth each offer their own versions of events, blurring the boundaries between what is imagined, perceived and believed.
Repetition operates conceptually, technically and structurally across the series. Armed figures, animals, vessels, trees, patterned grounds, grids and pixels return in altered configurations, enlarged, distorted or translated between drawing, painting and textile. Their recurrence suggests a history that repeats through variation. Repetition also has contradictory associations for the artist. It recalls Sufi practices in which repeated gestures or words produce concentration and spiritual movement, alongside disciplinary forms such as being ordered to copy a word one hundred times at school. The same act can reinforce history, impose obedience or eventually produce exhaustion. In the contemporary news cycle, images of destruction similarly return until urgency risks giving way to familiarity.
Material relationships reinforce these tensions. Monaiseer works across unconventional canvas formats and constructed frames; some rise into the tapering form of an obelisk, others unfurl in the manner of a scroll, resembling artefacts. These formats situate the works within longer histories of monument, inscription and transmission, extending the exhibition’s interest in how accounts of conflict are preserved and passed on. Monaiseer combines rusted iron found in the frames with repurposed kitchen cloths and khayamiya, the Egyptian tradition of hand-stitched textile appliqué associated with tentmaking. Iron is associated with infrastructure, weaponry and force, while its susceptibility to corrosion suggests that nothing is permanent. Its movement between polish and oxidisation reveals another cycle of transformation. Textile introduces the intimacy of touch, labour, nourishment, protection and shelter. Against the looming Doomsday Clock of the exhibition, these materials summon a contemporary condition in which structures that appear solid remain vulnerable to collapse and transformation.
